Virtual debut: Grammy nominee Mary Gauthier will play the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival for the first time as it goes online

Mary Gauthier is among the musicians who will make their Woody Guthrie Folk Festival debut this year as the festival moves to a virtual format due to the coronavirus pandemic. [Laura Partain photo]

Mary Gauthier considers herself part of the lineage of Woody Guthrie.

"The spirit of Woody Guthrie lives on, and I consider myself one of Woody's children. ... The approach to songwriting, I really relate to what he was up to. He was up to calling out fascism and connecting people and bringing love into the world and respect and dignity to all people. He was a rabblerouser and an activist in song. He really was a magic man, and his songs are timeless. They never expire," Gauthier said in a phone interview.

"He really taught folk singers like me how to approach a time like this, and he was and is a luminous figure for people who are interested in using songs for entertainment but also for more than just entertainment. He was great at both."

A Grammy-nominated folk singer-songwriter, Gauthier is one of the high-profile performers making their debut at this year's Woody Guthrie Folk Festival, even though the event affectionately known as WoodyFest is taking place virtually rather than in Guthrie's hometown of Okemah this year due to the coronavirus pandemic.

"We've been invited several times, but it always collides with some other festival. It's in the dead of summer, and usually I'm in Canada playing Canadian folk festivals. There's just always some collision. This was going to be my big 'finally get to go to WoodyFest and really excited about it' summer, but we're gonna do it online," Gauthier said.

"I'm really happy that the technology seems to be able to connect us and really happy that the Woody Guthrie Festival is going to play online. People will watch it."

The festival, which takes place annually place in the late, great folk singer's Oklahoma hometown around his July 14 birthday, will continue with musical performances Saturday and Sunday and panels on Saturday. Streaming will be available on AppleTV, Roku, YouTube, Facebook Live and more.

"As much as we would love to be in downtown Okemah and on the Pastures of Plenty with all our friends and family, it just can't happen right now, unfortunately," said Maddie Gregory, media chair for the nonprofit Woody Guthrie Coalition, which organizes WoodyFest.

"I think that it helps kind of keep that legacy of Woody alive, as well as protecting people while we can."

Eclectic lineup

Along with Gauthier, artists making their WoodyFest debut this year include Oscar-winning Irish vocalist, songwriter and guitarist GleAlthough Gauthier is glad to be included in this year's virtual WoodyFest, she said she hopes to make the pilgrimage to Okemah to perform at next year's festival in honor of Guthrie.

"Jaimee, it's her favorite festival, and I really, really want to experience it," Gauthier said. "He painted pictures, and that's part of how you change people's hearts is to tell a story with pictures so they can see enough to empathize with the character. The way to get to the universal is through the particular, to get closer in to the experience — and he was very, very good at that."

The Nashville, Tennessee-based folk-rocker earned acclaim for her empathetic songwriting on her latest album, 2018s "Rifles & Rosary Beads," which showcases songs she penned through her work with SongwritingWith:Soldiers, a nonprofit program that organizes retreats that pair professional songwriters with military members.

After the album's release, Gauthier won the Americana Music Association’s UK International Artist Of The Year Award, as well as Album of the Year at the International Folk Music Awards. "Rifles & Rosary Beads" also earned a Grammy nod in the Best Folk Album category and was nominated for Album Of The Year by the Americana Music Association.n Hansard and award-winning singer-songwriter Raye Zaragoza.

This year's celebration of the folk singer’s 108th birthday also will feature performances from Jason Mraz, Graham Nash, Branjae, BJ Barham, Ellis Paul, Jamie Lin Wilson, Joel Rafael, John Fullbright, Ali Harter, Samantha Crain and Jaimee Harris, who is Gauthier's partner.

"Most tributes to the troops don't include the words of the troops. These songs were co-written with those who've served — many have seen combat; an awful a lot of them (were) wounded — and their spouses. ... Even though they're not songwriters, it's their story," Gauthier said.

Pandemic pivot

For the release of "Rifles & Rosary Beads," Gauthier did a series of weekly Facebook Live broadcasts in which she played previews of the album's tracks and talked to her fans about the veterans who co-wrote each one of the songs.

That experience has proven invaluable this year as the pandemic has forced her to postpone most of her concerts and lean on her live-streaming skills.

"I kind of got used to the technology of looking at yourself on a screen and talking into the void and having comments come back during the release of that record, going on three years ago," Gauthier said.

Her weekly "Sundays W/ Mary" Facebook Live series recently garnered a mention in The New York Times.

"I came to music later in life. I was 40 when I came to Nashville to be a full-time songwriter. I had already owned a couple of restaurants, I had worked in construction, I had owned an all-female painting company. I'm the queen of pivot," she said.

"The uncertainty is a challenge, I think, for me, particularly as a touring musician who makes her living on the road. I'm not sure when I'll work again, which that's a big, giant uncertainty. So many people are suffering and struggling, and there's just a weird disconnect; like, at my house it's pretty peaceful. I'm growing a garden. My little inner circle is pretty calm, but I look just a little bit away ... and there's a lot of suffering."

Still, she said she is grateful that online outlets like her social media series and the virtual WoodyFest allow her to keep doing her job as a musician."There's a beautiful thing that happens when music connects with people, be it in a live-stream or in a small theater. It still connects," she said.GOING ONVirtual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival

till, she said she is grateful that online outlets like her social media series and the virtual WoodyFest allow her to keep doing her job as a musician.

"There's a beautiful thing that happens when music connects with people, be it in a live-stream or in a small theater. It still connects," she said.

GOING ON

Virtual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival

till, she said she is grateful that online outlets like her social media series and the virtual WoodyFest allow her to keep doing her job as a musician.

"There's a beautiful thing that happens when music connects with people, be it in a live-stream or in a small theater. It still connects," she said.

GOING ON

Virtual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival

The Oklahoman, July 17, 2020

How to Keep Music (and One Another) Alive | New York Times

NASHVILLE — On June 27, as Covid-19 cases were rising to a crisis level in Tennessee, the country music artist Chase Rice held a concert outside the Historic Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tenn. Packed tightly together and wearing no masks — at least none that were visible in the video Mr. Rice posted on Instagram — fans seemed unconcerned that a deadly pandemic was unfolding around them. And probably among them, too.

The video has since expired, but the backlash against Mr. Rice — and also Chris Janson, who played to a similar crowd in Filer, Idaho — was fierce. Coming on the heels of an image that circulated on social media of a packed bar at Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honkytonk and Rock ‘n’ Roll Steakhouse in Nashville’s tourist district, it seemed emblematic, a giant middle finger to the pandemic itself.

I’m as outraged as anyone at the sight of people making choices that will inevitably cost lives and prolong the pandemic, but I can understand, at least a little bit, why Mr. Rice held that concert and why his fans showed up.

Bands once supported themselves primarily through record sales. But then music went digital, and Napster, the early file-sharing platform, changed the industry almost overnight. I haven’t thought of Napster in years, but the shuttering of clubs and concert halls during this pandemic has reminded me of something the musician Rich Brotherton, my husband’s lifelong friend, heard Loudon Wainwright say at a concert some 20 years ago: “You’re file-sharing the food right out of my mouth.”

Today’s streaming services, which pay out a fraction of a cent per play, are marginally fairer than outright piracy, but their chief value to a performer is the opportunity to reach new listeners: If someone falls in love with a song, that new fan is apt to buy a concert ticket when the artist performs nearby.

Musicians can’t pay their bills if they can’t perform, but it’s not like Chase Rice had no options for waiting out the pandemic safely. Other musicians have found new ways to reach their old audiences. “Live From the Drive-In,” with performances by country, rock and rap artists, and the “Drive-In Theater Tour,” featuring Christian artists, offer concerts with social distancing baked in: Fans bring their own refreshments and stay with their cars, tailgate-style, for the whole show. At the country artist Keith Urban’s pop-up drive-in performance for front line medical workers in May, the audience “clapped” with their headlights.

Far more common are online performances streamed live and archived for those who missed the show. Last month Sturgill Simpson live streamed a benefit concert from the stage of Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium to an empty hall. Every week she’s in town, Marshall Chapman streams a “Saturdays at Springwater” show from the oldest continuously operated bar in Tennessee. Mary Gauthier streams both a concert series, “Sundays With Mary,” and master classes in songwriting. Mr. Brotherton’s Irish band, Úlla, can no longer keep its weekly date at an Austin club, so the musicians have moved their Sunday evening shows online, each performing from their own homes.

But for all its better-than-nothing virtues, a digital concert doesn’t have even remotely the power of a live performance. And the experience of seeing an artist in the flesh — or on a jumbotron — is only part of the draw.

The real beauty of an in-person concert is the relationship between the audience and the performer, and among members of the audience. It’s the feeling of being a part of something huge and beautiful and fleeting. A live musical performance, whether it’s in a stadium or in a storied concert hall or in the shabbiest dive bar on the loneliest back street, is a shared experience of transcendence. As Rosanne Cash wrote in a recent essay for The Atlantic, a live performance is an irreplaceable act of reciprocity: “They needed something from me, and giving it to them gave something back to me. I loved them. They knew it.”

These may seem like frivolous things in the context of a global health emergency, but they are not at all frivolous in the context of fear and isolation. It’s an awful lot to ask of performers to give up performing, and it is an awful lot to ask of fans to skip their shows.

Expecting people to do the right thing when the right thing flies in the face of human nature is never a good bet. Until it’s safe to sing along in public again, the only answer is for leaders to show some backbone and lock down the concert halls and the bars. Last week Nashville’s mayor John Cooper did just that.

If we ever hope to experience the transcendence of live performance again, we’re going to have to support the artists we love until the pandemic passes. We’re going to have to put some money in the tip jar at virtual concerts. Buy the T-shirts and the ball caps with the band logos on them. Above all, we’re going to have to start buying records again.

“The LPs and CDs that musicians would have on their merchandise tables at shows across the country are there to be had on their website stores right now,” the Nashville music journalist Craig Havighurst told me in a recent email. Buying the merch “is the most potent way fans can help artists survive this crisis.”

If people can get in the habit of buying records again, it would go a long way toward helping musicians and songwriters survive the pandemic and beyond. “This is the best possible time to rethink our consumption habits as fans for the short and long term,” Mr. Havighurst pointed out. “We should strive for an ethos where we stream to discover and purchase what we love.”

Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She is the author of the book “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Correction: July 6, 2020

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a country music artist. He is Chris Janson, not Jansen.